Developing the Soft Skills for Emotional Intelligence

An example of the necessary “soft skills” is the direct correlation between health professionals’ poor communication and medical errors. Emotional intelligence is required for leadership, critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and professionalism. They are skills that can be learned, and most importantly must be practiced. It’s been obvious in my Medical Improv workshops that professionals who practice together, succeed together.

Soft Skills Crucial To Landing Your Dream Job

Guy Berger

Earlier this year, we published a list of the 25 most in-demand skills — like mobile development, channel marketing, and economics. As you may have noticed, all of the skills on the list are “hard skills,” or specific skills required to do a job that can be learned.

That’s why we were surprised when recruiters started telling us that they were having a hard time finding people with the right “soft skills,” or personal attributes that help people interact effectively with others – like communication, teamwork and critical thinking. Hard skills vary based on the job, but soft skills are required for every job. For example, a cook must be able to finely dice vegetables, but a server doesn’t. But both must be team players and communicate effectively for the restaurant they work in to succeed. That makes soft skills extremely valuable, and the growing lack of them provides professionals like you with an opportunity to stand out from the pack!

That’s why we tapped into the Economic Graph to see what we could uncover on soft skills. Our research led to the development of Master In-Demand Professional Soft Skills — this is a new Lynda.com Learning Path designed to help people learn the most in-demand soft skills. It’s free for everyone for the next 30 days, so check it out!

Here’s what we uncovered:

Soft skills are hard to come by

We asked 291 U.S. hiring managers how hard it was to find candidates with the right soft skills for each of the jobs they were hiring for. They said it’s hard to find people with the right soft skills for fifty-nine percent of their open jobs.

Top 10 most sought after soft skills

To find the most sought after soft skills, we analyzed the soft skills listed on the profiles of members who job-hopped (defined as a member changing their employer on their LinkedIn profile) between June 2014 and June 2015 to identify the most sought-after soft skills among employers.